Bush administration plans user fees to keep rivers navigable

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration wants to impose a new user fee on commercial barges to help pay for the soaring cost of maintaining the nation's river channels.

But barge operators say they already pay steep taxes to keep the Mississippi River and other waterways navigable. And the director of the SEMO Port Authority, Dan Overby, said the plan could hinder port operations if the fees force shippers to switch to rail or truck carriers.

The proposal, included in President Bush's $2.9 trillion budget proposal released Monday, does not specify how fees would be assessed.

"We'd like to explore user fee concepts but we don't have a proposal that we're putting out yet," said John Paul Woodley, the assistant Army secretary who oversees the Army Corps of Engineers. "We want to hear what the industry people and the shippers have in mind."

Considering options

One item that should be considered before imposing more costs on barge operators, costs that are passed on as higher shipping rates, would be to look at spreading the cost to other river users, Overby said. Rivers are used for water supplies and pleasure boating and the lock and dam systems also provide flood control.

"Those things have a cost and that is where everybody gets into a big argument," he said.

Barge operators now pay a tax of 20 cents per gallon on diesel fuel that goes into a waterway trust fund. Half the cost of replacing and repairing the nation's massive system of locks and dams comes from that trust fund, while the other half comes from the Corps' general revenue.

The problem, Woodley said, is that the trust fund has steadily decreased over the past decade as barge tow boats have become more fuel efficient. The fund had $250 million as of October.

At the same time, spending to repair aging locks built in the 1930s on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and other waterways has increased dramatically.

"At that rate, you are very quickly going to exhaust the trust fund," Woodley said. "The question becomes, 'What are you going to do?"'

One option, Woodley said, is to tie new fees to how often barges go through existing locks. Any increase in barge traffic would mean more money in the trust fund.

The barge industry, facing rising costs of its own, is gearing up for a fight.

"Operators have already paid roughly $1 billion in fuel taxes over the past 10 years for this purpose," said Anne Burns, a vice president at American Waterways Operators, a national trade association for the tugboat, towboat and barge industry.

Postponing new construction projects until the trust fund gains more money is not an option, Woodley said.

One project the barge industry has been pushing for years is a plan to double the size of locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Both the Senate and the House approved legislation last year for the $1.8 billion construction plan, but lawmakers could not agree in conference and the measure died.

Lawmakers expect to reintroduce the measure this year, but Woodley said the Bush administration will not taken a formal position on the bill until it completes an economic study.